Halloween in Town Times
Friday, October 28, 2011
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Halloween is too much fun for one Middlefield resident By Diana Carr Special to the Town Times
A life-size monster lurking in the yard. Submitted photos the neighborhood is dark, and safety is a good thing. “Sometimes we have a fog machine, but it’s not always
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movie The Exorcist was born. “She’s six-and-a-half feet tall,” says Volturno, “skinny and creepy, with long claws. My brother-inlaw doesn’t like her. She scares him.” Chaney, named after horror flick star Lon
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onto foam mannequin heads that sport wigs, or masks are used. It’s quite a menagerie. There’s Barlow, named after the character in the movie Salem’s Lot; he’s seven feet tall, bald and “creepy.” She thought that Barlow needed a girlfriend, so Regan, named after the star of the
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Come to the dark side; we have cookies. Here lies Walter Dudley; he found out too late that Rottweillers aren’t cuddly. Here lies the body of my sweet sister; she was just fine until Dracula kissed her. I told you I was sick. Here lies the body of Cyrus Sun; getting here was half the fun. Here lies Suzy Sass, dead from shock over the price of gas. No, you’re not ambling through our local cemetery. You’ve got a ringside seat at the ghoulish home — all bedecked for Halloween — of the Volturno family, of Middlefield. It’s the home of Crista, her husband,Nicholas,andher15year-old son, Mason, and it is replete with five gruesome monsters, about 30 tombstones and plastic body parts, all enclosed by a fence, and all made by the Misses. The gated entrance with the word “Cemetery” sprawled at the top and the plastic ravens perched atop the pillars lets youknowyou’renotinKansas (orMiddlefield)anymore. Says Volturno, “On Halloween, we use caution tape to close off the driveway so that people have to go through the cemetery. Neighbors look for new stuff every year and keep asking me when we’re going to put everything up. The kids really look forward to coming here because it is all lit up. We give out glow bracelets to the trick-or-treaters because
effective because the wind blows the fog away. We board up the last two windows in the house, so it looks creepy. Some years we have a strobe light in the house so that it looks like everything is flickering inside. Some years we’ve had zombies coming out of the ground. We have red spotlights at night.” Volturno, who says her family does not love Halloween as much as she does (“they tolerate my enthusiasm”), learned how to make all this by going online. The monsters are built from 2x4s, chicken wire and Monster Mud (a combination of black paint and joint compound). She dips strips of burlap into the Monster Mud and wraps it around the frame. The arms are made out of PVC, and the hands are wire coat hangers covered with a spray that expands, giving “grotesque-looking hands that can bend any way you want.” Faces are fashioned
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